Crisis

I can no longer hear
my own poetic voice.
I hunt in my last four years
for a new chapbook;
everything I find
is grey, unmoving, dead.
Those I thought
were finished poems
turn out to be drafts,
those I thought drafts
are discards.

How can my friends
have praised
these lifeless lumps
of verse?
Now I am on
the other side
of the fence
with those who asked,
bewildered,
what makes this
not prose?

Rapidly this lack
of song, colour, blood
pervades all else there is.
This must be
depression, I think,
that affliction
which others know.
I know I must stop
writing poems.
Now. Here,
let me explain ...

Living Beauty

for Lisa

I am swamped in beauty
thick with it, deep in delight.
There is no self, only sense.

Each grass blade
sings with colour,
each floating cloud-wisp
endlessly, easily changes shape.
Sky and earth around me
cradle me. The sun is my mother.

As I slowly separate,
experiencing ends of fingers
containment of skin,
the looker and listener
inside my eyes and ears
wants. Hungers.

Beauty is all.
Let it flow through me,
let me be it, be that,
be all expressions of that.

Let me shake with music,
radiate light,
let my exquisite perfume
cause you to faint with pleasure,
let my touch be that you return to
over and over, and my taste
titillate your tongue forever.

Finding I cannot sing sweet,
and face and form only average fair,
how can I gift my world
with the beauty I long to express?
How can I channel it through me
at one with the beautiful
earth, sky, universe?

Words are my answer
words are my dream
words are my burst of light.
World, I give you back yourself
in words, in love, in myself, in beauty.